NORTHCOTE, John (c.1600-76), of Hayne, Newton St Cyres, Devon.

John Northcote’s grandfather was a wealthy clothier in Crediton, who left money for poor weavers of that town, but the family was prominent in Devon long before the sixteenth century. They took their name from a manor in the north Devon parish of East Down, and one of John Northcote’s ancestors served as high sheriff in 1353.23Vivian, Vis. Devon, 581-2; List of Sheriffs (L. and I. ix), 35. Northcote’s father, a gentleman emancipated from trade through the landed inheritance left in Crediton and district by his own father, was deeply pious, describing himself in his will as ‘the unprofitable servant of God’. It was probably he rather than his son who was sheriff in 1626.24PROB11/165/155. John Northcote junior attended Exeter College, Oxford, the college most favoured by the Devon gentry, left without taking a degree and proceeded to the Middle Temple, where he remained at least until 1623.25MTR ii. 633, 681. Appointed a militia captain by 1627, in recognition of his status as the eldest son of a gentleman, he was not included in any other commissions from chancery until he became a justice of the peace and subsidy commissioner in 1641. In the meantime he seems to have consolidated his estates, buying Iddesleigh manor in 1633, which included 2,000 acres of land, and leasing the lands of a convicted Roman Catholic recusant.26Coventry Docquets, 271, 645. Northcote’s first significant involvement in public life seems to have come in late March 1640, when he was active in procuring maps and drafts of commissions for a peer. In the course of executing these tasks, Northcote travelled to London and York, and it seems likely that this was work in connection with preparations for the second bishops’ war, and that he was helping Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, who had been given command of the campaign.27Northcote Note Bk. pp. xviii-xix, 120-1. As lord high admiral, Northumberland enjoyed extensive influence in a maritime county such as Devon. Furthermore, Northumberland’s ‘man of business’, Hugh Potter*, was from Iddesleigh, a manor in west Devon which Northcote owned. It is likely that Potter and Iddesleigh provide the link between the peer and the Crediton gentleman.28Devon RO, 51/24/47/1; 46/1/3/7.

Long Parliament, 1640-2

Northcote was returned for the stannary town of Ashburton after the Commons decided on 26 November 1640 that the borough had the right of representation in Parliament.29CJ ii. 37a. John Bampfylde† wrote to Edward Seymour* in January 1641, assuring him that Northcote would make an excellent parliament-man, ‘if you can keep him silent’.30HMC 15th Rep. vii. 64. He first came to the attention of the clerks on 16 February, when he was named to the committee on abuses in the court of wards, accompanied by the Devonians Edmund Prideaux I and John Rolle.31CJ ii. 87a. Northcote made his first recorded speech on 19 February, when he asked that a petition from Devon attacking episcopacy might be read.32D’Ewes (N), 375. On 27 February, he involved himself in the quarrel between John Wylde* and Sir Henry Herbert*, alleging that Herbert also insulted two other Members, Edmund Prideaux I and William Constantine (he was later named to a committee on this affair), and on 4 March declared himself willing to be bound in the sum of £500 for maintaining the armies in the north.33D’Ewes (N), 415, 438n; CJ ii. 467b. He sat on two committees in April, one on a bill for better preaching of the gospel (12 Apr.), but was rather more active in May. He took the Protestation (3 May) and on the 26th he was in a single day named to four committees, two of them, on recusancy and on the customs farmers, of some importance.34CJ ii. 133a, 156b, 157a, 158a. With two other Devon Members, George Peard and Lawrence Whitaker, he was named to a bill to bring water from Hertfordshire to London.35CJ ii. 161a.

Northcote’s burst of parliamentary activity in May 1641 was not sustained. He was nominated to a committee for disbanding armies in the north in June, but then served on no further committees until December. This six-month period of quietness on Northcote’s part coincided with the award to him of a baronetcy by the king. He had certainly not shown himself earlier to have been hostile to the king’s interest, and perhaps the baronetcy was intended to win him over to the king’s party in the Commons. In the event, his interest in the proceedings of Parliament seems to have been revived, not by the possibility of office or further favour at court but by the outbreak of the rebellion in Ireland. On 23 November Northcote brought to the attention of the House a letter from one of the Devon deputy lieutenants which reported that commanders of the Irish rebels were passing through Devon on their way to Ireland; it was ordered that all magistrates should be vigilant in arresting any suspects of this kind. In similar vein, on 18 December he was named to a committee charged with scrutinizing letters written in France which provided information on security matters.36CJ ii. 348b; D’Ewes (C), 189. He was an advocate for a young Protestant man, the grandson of a deceased Irish peer, who sought a post in the punitive army planned for Ireland, and expressed the view that the whole of a regiment intended for service there should be raised in England rather than partly recruited in Ireland. As this conflict began, Northcote retained an interest in another that was nearing resolution, but opposed the Scots commissioners’ preference for equal pay for the soldiers of both Scots and English armies, arguing that ‘their discipline differed from ours’.37D’Ewes (C), 289, 294, 372. On 27 December, he was named to a committee receiving intelligence from the Irish province of Munster.38CJ ii. 357b.

Ireland remained Northcote’s main interest between January and March 1642. He was added to a committee on nominations to the expeditionary army (8 Mar.) and to the committee working on the bill which governed the planning for it (10 Mar). He was named to a joint committee with the Lords on the plans for spending the money raised by contributions, what subsequently became known as the Irish Adventure (19 Mar.), and to a Commons committee working on a bill intended to gloss and explain the act on ‘reducing’ Ireland (23 Mar.).39CJ ii. 472a, 474a, 486a, 493b. His presence on the committee of 11 Members charged with noting the names of absentee colleagues (25 Mar.) suggests a growing zeal for Commons policies, as does his only appearance before 1648 as a teller (14 Mar.), when he was paired with the ‘fiery spirit’, Henry Marten, in a division on a dispute at Lincoln’s Inn.40CJ ii. 477b, 496b.

After the episode of the Five Members in January 1642, Northcote’s name appeared on the list of committeemen for the bill to enable Parliament to adjourn from place to place (11 Jan.), and on 14 January he contributed a speech which given the tense atmosphere in the Commons at the time, was bound to cause immediate controversy. Various speakers had suggested that William Seymour, 1st marquess of Hertford, should take the prince of Wales into his own custody, the peer having been previously appointed his governor by the king. Northcote opposed this, but advanced as his reason a fear of exacerbating the tensions which he said arose from rumours circulating that it was intended to depose the king and crown the prince. Northcote was unable to finish his speech, such was the uproar this provoked.41PJ i. 63. Edward Seymour must have been reminded of Thomas Bampfylde’s comments a year earlier on Northcote’s all too ready tongue. Nothing abashed, however, Northcote spoke out again less than a fortnight later, when he compared the suggestion by James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond, that Parliament be adjourned for six months to ‘dangerous words that ever were spoken and hatched by the Jesuits’. He referred to words spoken in 1529 by the bishop of Rochester, a case which to his satisfaction illustrated the principle that commoners appealed directly to the king when lords conducted themselves unjustly towards them.42PJ i. 196. On this occasion, he was better attuned to the mood of the House but he soon showed himself to be of erratic political judgment when he moved (12 Feb.) the granting of bail to Sir William Killigrew, an associate of the king’s during the attempt on the Five Members. Two of the Five Members themselves, Denzil Holles and William Strode I, wanted to question Northcote over this surprising demonstration of sympathy.43PJ i. 355, 368. It was probably distaste for a personal attack on the king that led Northcote to object on 8 March to the wording of a draft answer to one of the king’s messages. The House wished to express its hope that the king would retract policies enacted on the advice of evil councillors. Northcote objected to ‘retract’, but John Pym told him that it was the word that had appeared in the king’s own message.44PJ ii. 10.

A strong suggestion that Northcote was impetuous as well as garrulous came on 2 April. Sir Simonds D’Ewes* took Northcote home to show him his copy of William Lambarde’s Archaionomia, a sixteenth-century collection on Saxon laws, containing an entry about a May Day assembly, which suggested a comparison with the current Parliament. Northcote said he intended to cite the example in the House, but D’Ewes told him that it was probably spurious and could not be cited as a reliable precedent. When D’Ewes returned to the House, it was to hear Northcote quoting it in a speech. D’Ewes was obliged to speak to point out the defectiveness of both example and source, but Northcote persisted, attributing his information to D’Ewes. When the latter, deeply mortified, spoke again to repeat his caveat, ‘the House turned it into a matter of mirth’.45PJ ii. 121. D’Ewes records how he got his own back on 8 June. Northcote moved a declaration on Parliament’s ‘propositions’ for raising money, ‘but so hack[ed] it and hew[ed] it in the uttering as the House had much ado to forbear laughter’. D’Ewes rose to support Northcote, but commented on the Devon man’s performance in such a way as to cause many Members ‘to laugh outright’.46PJ iii. 45.

Northcote was called again to a joint committee with the Lords on 5 April, this time on tumults and seditious pamphlets, where he was joined by his ally, Sir John Bampfylde, in whose company he was also nominated to two committees on petitions by Lieutenant Robert Davies (9 Apr.) and the heirs of one Blagrave (2 May).47CJ ii. 512b, 519b, 553b. By this time Northcote’s attention was shifting to the portents of armed conflict in England. With John Pym and Henry Marten, he was added to a committee on the legal basis for mustering men, after a report had found that mustering by authority of the king’s great seal was illegal (27 May), and with Pym and the Devonian, Sir Samuel Rolle, went to the merchant strangers in London to seek a loan for Parliament (14 June).48CJ ii. 588b, 623a. On 10 June he promised to bring in £100 in cash and two horses and men immediately, with four more as soon as he could get them from the country.49PJ iii. 466. The following week, he was part of a committee urgently considering how to prevent the king’s commissions of array from going into the counties, was on another committee with the Lords to liaise with the City on Parliament’s money-raising propositions the following day, and on the 20th was ordered to Devon to implement the militia ordinance.50CJ ii. 630a, 632b, 633b. In this flurry of activity he seems to have worked closely with William Strode I, the radical Member for Bere Alston. Northcote successfully proposed Strode as the messenger to the Lords to ask that the Devon militia might be implemented, and the same day (17 June) proposed that parliamentary declarations should be read in the universities. On the 20th, it was Strode who moved that Northcote should go to Devon as a deputy lieutenant.51PJ iii. 93, 94, 104.

Civil war, 1642-5

Before Northcote left for the west country he prepared a letter of thanks for the Speaker to sign which was to be sent to the mayor and sheriff of Exeter in response to their warnings of the royalists’ proclaiming the king’s commission of array.52CJ ii. 634b On 4 July the Commons authorised Northcote, Sir John Bampfylde and two other Devon gentry figures to advance Parliament’s propositions for raising a regiment in the county, and by the 12th Northcote was acting as a deputy lieutenant in signing summonses to call out the trained bands: in effect a bid which rivalled the royalists’ efforts to win over those who served in more normal times in the militia.53CJ ii. 651a; Som. RO. DD WO56/6/52-2, 52-3. The grand jury at the Devon assizes in August called upon Northcote, Bampfylde and Sir Samuel Rolle to ‘bind up our wounds, prevent blood, heal our divisions’, but by September Northcote was active in the field of battle on Parliament’s behalf.54Three Petitions presented by the Grand Inquest (1642), 8 (E.112.14). Early that month, he and Sir George Chudleigh provided Devon contingents, said to be about 900 men from the trained bands, to the force of 7000 foot and 8 troops of horse assembled by William Russell, 5th earl of Bedford, outside Sherborne in Dorset, intending to besiege the castle, held for the king by the marquess of Hertford. Having been repulsed with artillery fire, Northcote requested a treaty so that Bedford’s army could withdraw with dignity. Hertford refused to agree, so the Devon men were forced to retreat with Hertford harassing their rear.55Bellum Civile, 11, 13; Exceeding Joyfull Newes from the Earle of Bedfords Army (1642), sig. A29(iii). Northcote’s cousin, Sir Hugh Pollarde*, who took the king’s side in the civil war, reported to Henry Bourchier, 5th earl of Bath, that Chudleigh, Northcote and Bampfylde were achieving no success in raising either men or money, but soon afterwards the earl himself was captured by the parliamentarians. The royalists were more fortunate in Cornwall, and Northcote was among those whose letter to the Speaker reporting the strength of the Cornish cavaliers was read on 21 October.56HMC 4th Rep. 304, 308; CJ ii. 818a; E.A. Andriette, Devon and Exeter in the Civil War (Newton Abbot, 1971), 63-4.

Northcote was back in the House by 10 December, and probably helped prepare the order clearing himself, Sir Samuel Rolle and others from the treason imputed to them in an order of the king. 57Harl. 164, ff. 247, 267v; LJ v. 478a; HMC Portland, i. 77. He was part of a delegation to the City on 13 December which reported on affairs in the west and recommended Denzil Holles as commander-in-chief there. Northcote and Bampfylde later took to the Lords the request to grant Holles the commission (19 Dec.), but Holles declined it, having becoming disillusioned about the purposes of the war.58CJ ii. 886b, 895a. There was by this time a parliamentary committee of the western parts, and Northcote was prominent in presenting to both Commons and Lords its proposals for managing the war there. Among the articles Northcote brought to the House were proposals for martial law, which were opposed by Sir Simonds D’Ewes.59Harl. 164, ff. 274, 313, 313v.

On 27 December, the House ordered him to return to Devon as one of the military leaders of the county.60CJ ii. 902a, 903a-b, 909b. In January 1643 came a report from Salisbury of an escape from the gaol there, executed by soldiers heading west from London to serve under him at Exeter.61HMC Portland, i. 87. Among those that Northcote recruited in the capital were professional army officers from the Low Countries.62M. Coate, ‘An original diary of Col. Robert Bennett’, Devon and Cornw. N and Q, xviii. 257. The forces raised in north Devon by Northcote, Sir John Bampfylde and Sir Samuel Rolle, said to have been 10,000 in number, were successful in skirmishes with the royalists at Chagford and Modbury, but Northcote was no hardliner.63A True Relation of the Late Victory (1643), 3-4 (E.91.25); Speciall Passages and Certain Informations no. 27 (7-14 Feb. 1643), 226 (E.89.17); Good Newes from Plymouth (1643, 669.f.6.111). By the end of February he was an advocate of, and commissioner for, the peace treaty with the Cornish royalists, grounded on the principle that both sides were fighting ‘for the same religion, laws and liberties’.64Harl. 164, f. 313; Som. RO, DD WO56/6/30; Bellum Civile, 34-5; The Protestation taken by the Commissioners (1643), 12 (E.94.21). The truce lasted through March, but in Westminster Sir William Waller* and Edmund Prideaux I were among those who disapproved of the treaty as destructive ‘to the kingdom and their own county’. The treaty had been concluded at a point when the Cornish army might have been broken if the parliamentarians had pressed their advantage, and it had allowed the king to build his strength. Waller and Prideaux were confident that the Cornish royalists had no sincere interest in peace.65HMC 4th Rep. 308. Northcote and the other local commissioners wrote an extensive apologia (15 Mar.) for their actions, laying out their reasons but concluding that if they broke off the treaty, ‘they should gain more advantage by it than their said [Cornish] neighbours’.66Harl. 166, ff. 333, 333v.

Northcote seems to have been converted by these arguments to a more determined opposition to the king. On 4 April he and the MPs among the other Devon commissioners were included in the committee which supervised the more uncompromising line taken by Prideaux and Anthony Nicoll*, and later that month put his name to a Declaration which denounced ‘subtle devices of pretended [mo]tions of peace’.67CJ iii. 29a; Som. RO, DD WO56/6/59. Pursuing the royalists into Cornwall, the parliamentarian army suffered a heavy defeat at Stratton (16 May), and its leader, Henry Grey, 1st earl of Stamford, with other officers including Northcote, were obliged to retreat to Exeter, where they were besieged. At Exeter in July, Northcote was shot through the arm, and when the city fell to the king in September, he was confined to his house at Newton St Cyres on his parole.68Oxford DNB; Certaine Informations no. 27 (17-24 July 1643), 216 (E.61.16); M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction (Exeter, 1996), 202; Symonds, Diary, 41. Northcote was offered a pardon by the king in February 1644, but declined it, and by October, after a year under close supervision, he had become an object in negotiations over prisoner exchanges. It was on this basis, as a prisoner exchanged for a prominent royalist, Rupert, Lord Brereton, that Northcote was finally released in April 1645.69Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 150; CJ iii. 666a; iv. 30a, 83b, 101b; Add. 31116, pp. 377, 398.

Parliament and Devon, 1645-8

Northcote was formally admitted to the House on 7 May 1645, and took the Covenant on the 28th.70CJ iv. 133b, 156a. He was added to the parliamentary committee for Plymouth and Poole garrisons, which both held out against royalist sieges, and in June was granted the weekly allowance of £4 extended to those MPs whose estates had been destroyed by the royalists.71CJ iv. 160b, 161a. As he fitted himself back in again to the work of the House, he was named to committees on military initiatives in the west (5 July), the bill for selling delinquents’ estates (31 July) and for providing financial support for his former commander, the earl of Stamford (11 Sept.).72CJ iv. 197a, 225a, 271a. With Edmund Prideaux I and Walter Yonge I, he was added to the committee for privileges on 16 October.73CJ iv. 311a. Northcote’s servant, a prisoner at Winchester, was examined in November amid allegations that he had carried correspondence for the royalist grandee George Lord Digby*, who after the king’s defeat at Naseby had regrouped with a force in Yorkshire which had recently been destroyed. Interest focussed on a cypher mentioning Northcote himself, but he seems not to have been damaged by the episode.74CJ iv. 352b; Add. 18780, f. 170.

Northcote was named on 11 December to a committee dealing with a complaint by the Westminster Assembly over an unauthorized publication: an unusual appointment for him, as religion did not figure strongly among his parliamentary interests, if judged by committee appointments.75CJ iv. 373a. He sat on a committee in mid-February 1646 to consider ways of preserving Parliament’s authority in revenue matters, and on the same day fresh instructions were issued to him and other Devon MPs to settle government in the south west, after the New Model had pushed into the region.76CJ iv. 440a, 444a. He was away from the House until July, when he was named to committees on John Lilburne (3 July), the sale of delinquents’ estates (10 July), exemption for those loyal to Parliament from paying fee farm rents to the king (17 July) and to receive complaints against royalists (23 July).77CJ iv. 601b, 613a, 620a, 625b. He was granted leave on 4 September, but between then and the end of December was named to another eight committees, not a large total, but enough to suggest he remained mostly in London.78CJ iv. 663a.

Northcote was a significant figure in the Committee of the West, a body at Westminster originally set up to direct the parliamentarian war effort in the south western counties. He reported from this body on 18 September; his appearance in lists of nominees to committees on major-generals (10 Oct.), on a petition from City militia commanders (15 Oct.) and one from the soldiers of Edward Massie* suggests that he was aligned with the military interests sidelined by the creation of the New Model army.79CJ iv. 672a, 689b, 694b; v. 28b. In December Northcote reported that on the seas off the west country Irish ships were threatening the lives of English captives, as retaliation against an ordinance of 1644 which forbade quarter to any Irish taken in arms. The Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports invited Parliament to consider a repeal.80HMC 6th Rep. 148. Between October 1646 and mid-January 1647, Northcote was named to six committee with the Independent, Edmund Prideaux I, but Northcote did not share his fellow-Devonian’s political sympathies.81CJ iv. 681b, 689b, 694b, 735b; v. 51b. Indeed, his activity in Parliament tailed off sharply during 1647, a year in which he was named to only nine committees in the House. He was given leave twice, on 23 February and 21 June, the latter on account of his wife’s illness.82CJ v. 95b, 218b. On 1 July, he was added to a committee on an ordinance to ensure the orderly departure of soldiers from London, but was absent at a call of the House on 9 October.83CJ v. 229a, 330a.

Northcote spent time in Exeter between July and November 1647. He was there with other members of the Devon committee, including Sir John Bampfylde, John Elford*, William Bastard*, Arthur Upton*, Thomas Boone* and Sir John Yonge*, early in September, when he was threatened by soldiers clamouring for pay.84Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 507. Perhaps motivated by this local crisis, he returned to the House in November, when he sat on a committee to investigate the king’s escape from Hampton Court and another to inquire into meetings in London held allegedly to sow enmity between Parliament and army.85CJ v. 357a, 360a. If he attended the committee on a Leveller pamphlet (18 Nov.) or that on the Tower Hamlets militia (19 Nov.), he would have been much more sympathetic towards the latter than towards the former.86CJ v. 363a, 363b. He was among the Devon Members sent to the country to bring in assessments on 23 December, but had been given leave again on the 3rd of that month, and it was not until the following May that Northcote was again in the House.87CJ v. 375b, 400b, 543b, 551a. Against the background of the second civil war and further disturbances at Exeter between soldiers and citizens, he served on committees for the national militia (4 May, 13 June), and considered the fate of prisoners taken at the battle of St Fagans, near Cardiff (12 May).88CJ v. 551a, 557b.

With John Doddridge he was named to the committee to investigate the riot that took place outside Parliament on 16 May, and was part of the delegation to the City on 23 May that was intended to extract arrears of grants of money so that the army could be paid off.89CJ v. 562b, 571a, 574a, 597b. In a division on 17 June, Northcote was a teller on whether to put the question that all taking commissions from Parliament should have taken the Covenant. This would have been anathema to the Independents, and Northcote would have supported the substantive motion. On 19 June he was again required to return to Devon to establish the militia, in company with Sir John Bampfylde, Sir John Yonge and John Waddon*, among others.90CJ v. 604a, 606b. He was back in Exeter by July, to sit with the Devon magistrates at quarter sessions, his first and last appearance there since Parliament had established its rule over the country.91Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8. Charged with establishing an effective militia in the county, Northcote, Bampfylde and others of the committee complained to the Speaker about the ordinance that governed their activities, and requested fresh legislation to help them set up a local force without oppressing Parliament’s supporters. With Robert Shapcote*, Arthur Upton, William Morice and Bampfylde, Northcote conveyed to Speaker William Lenthall the committee’s anxieties about ‘intestine seditions’, but in August was busy signing commissions to militia officers and securing the safety of the Devon seaports.92Bodl. Nalson VII, f. 163; Tanner 57, ff. 173, 237; Add. 44058, ff. 26v, 27, 35; CJ vi. 5a.

It seems unlikely that Northcote returned to Westminster after the summer of 1648. He was excused at a call of the House on 26 September, and although he was named on 25 November among the Devon Members required to bring in assessments from the country, he was not necessarily in attendance to hear this order read.93CJ vi. 34b, 87b. The news of Pride’s purge of Parliament, followed by the trial and execution of the king must have horrified Northcote, who withdrew completely from formal public life by the end of December 1648. Behind the scenes, however, he remained a significant figure. His former colleagues on the Devon bench referred a petition from his locality to him in January 1650, a year after he had left the bench.94Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8, Epiphany 1650. By July 1652, a distance between him and the magistrates had appeared, as he complained to them about the unequal burden of rates in Crediton.95Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8, Midsummer 1652. In the mid-1650s, he protected the minister of Upton Pyne, ejected from his living by John Coplestone* and John Disbrowe*, and the minister of his own parish of Newton St Cyres, Robert Bradford, held the living by Northcote’s patronage from 1642 to 1667. Bradford did not sign the Devon Presbyterian ministers’ Joint-Testimonie of 1648, and remained in his benefice through the Anglican revenge of the early 1660s, suggesting that Northcote’s personal religious sympathies were episcopalian.96Bodl. Walker c.2, pp. 316, 348. Or perhaps he was simply personally broad-minded: in 1662, Northcote found an ejected Independent minister, Edward Bynes, a living at Pyworthy. 97Bodl. Walker c.2, p. 32.

Protectorate Parliaments, 1654-9

Wherever Northcote’s personal religious inclinations tended, the Cromwellian government marked him down as a Presbyterian in political terms, and although he was elected to both the 1654 and 1656 Parliaments as knight of the shire, he played no part in either assembly. In 1654 he may have refused to sit, despite receiving the ‘paper with arguments for subscribing’ to the engagement, as circulated by Thomas Gewen* and Thomas Bampfylde; but in 1656 the decision was taken out of his hands, as he was prevented by the lord protector’s council from taking his seat.98Archaeologia, xxiv. 139-40; CJ vii. 425b. The death of Oliver Cromwell* in September 1658 seems to have tempted Northcote back into public life. He was elected knight of the shire to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament on 18 January 1659, and sat on the Devon bench of magistrates, to which he had been restored, at around the same time.99C219/46; Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/9. In the new Parliament, Northcote sat on six committees, the most significant being the elections and privileges committee (28 Jan.) and the committees for Irish and Scottish affairs (1 Apr.).100CJ vii. 594b, 623b. He was named to a committee on representation for Durham (30 Mar.), two on the affairs of Samuel Vassall* (1 Apr.) and one on the case of Thomas Howard, 16th or 23rd earl of Arundel, an exile whose religious affiliations were in question (8 Apr.). Despite this rather meagre total, Northcote was vocal enough in debate in this Parliament. He made at least 22 speeches, all captured by the parliamentary diarists, in which he spoke on constitutional affairs, particularly on relations with the Other House, and on army matters.

Northcote was evidently ambitious for this Parliament, declaring that he would leave the country if it achieved only the minimum: ‘If we do no more but recognize and raise money, I should wish to go beyond sea’.101Burton’s Diary, iii. 231. On a number of occasions he complained about the time-wasting caused by procedural muddles and personal squabbles, and there is nothing to suggest that he was really working for the overthrow of the protectorate.102Burton’s Diary, iii. 197, 272, 370, iv. 105, 216. When, scenting blood, the republicans began to circle round Cromwellians with questionable pasts, such as Edmund Jones*, Northcote advised his colleagues (12 Feb.) that if they were to pursue all with previous royalist connections, ‘you will have a thin House’.103Burton’s Diary, iii. 237. Against Sir Arthur Hesilrige’s* construction that a letter from the lord protector to the House was a breach of privilege, Northcote argued that it was no such thing, but was alarmed by the former’s allegation that in the army it was said that the House had blocked army pay. Northcote demanded to know why, if there was such a crisis, the House had been assembled earlier. On 18 February, he wondered whether parliamentary authority rested on ‘usage, constitutions or conquest’, and on 1 March made a longer foray into questions of historical precedent.104Burton’s Diary, iii. 342; Schilling thesis, 89, 147. In a speech which recalled the one which annoyed Sir Simonds D’Ewes back in April 1642, he described the electoral arrangements of the Anglo-Saxons and claimed to show how shallow were the roots of the hereditary principle in the peerage. D’Ewes had asserted that all power derived from the people, by which he intended not an expression of republicanism but to challenge the assertion by his fellow-Devonian John Maynard* that no law was properly made except by king, Lords and Commons.105Burton’s Diary, iii. 575.

Northcote’s dismissal of the hereditary principle in the old House of Lords was not a vindication of the Cromwellian Other House. Because the new chamber consisted of the lord protector’s appointees, Northcote was suspicious of the motives of some of its Members. ‘Some of them that offered force to Parliaments, and disturbed us, are sitting there, what they have done they may do’.106Burton’s Diary, iv. 33; Schilling thesis, 170-1. Furthermore the members of the Other House included ‘mean people’, who needed payment; in the time of Elizabeth I the chamber included lords lieutenant, the voluntary titular heads of a voluntary service that descended to yeoman militiamen, whose services to the state were all provided free.107Burton’s Diary, iv. 33. In the light of Northcote’s many suspicions of the Other House, his comments on the hereditary principle are shown to have been a vindication of the old peers, not an attack on them. He sought rather to rehabilitate the old Lords, minus their colleagues who had served Charles I, or had offended the state in some way. When it came to ‘bounding and approving’ the Other House, Northcote wanted to bind and approve the old peers instead.108Burton’s Diary, iii. 415; iv. 284; Schilling thesis, 104-5.

Perhaps naturally, Northcote tended to talk up the Long Parliament of the 1640s and to denigrate the various regimes of the earlier 1650s. In moves to annul the proceedings against the late John Lilburne, Northcote doubted whether an act had lain behind the Rump’s prosecution of him, and defended the Long Parliament against casual slights by other Members. He asserted that under it he fought against ‘an exorbitant power’ in the late king, and would ‘fight against it again to the last drop of blood, if his Highness command me’.109Burton’s Diary, iii. 509; iv. 33, 198. Perhaps recalling his own career in the field, he was in support of dealing promptly with issues of army pay, but wanted a vote that money was only to be levied by assent of Parliament, and against the background of rising public debt, urged his colleagues not to accept liability for any debts which Parliament had not approved, nor to allow any taxes without parliamentary consent. The supremacy of Parliament was a theme that underlay many of Northcote’s pronouncements, and he reminded his hearers that Parliament’s judgements were of higher authority than the rulings of judges.110Burton’s Diary, iv. 139, 321-2, 363; Derbs. RO, D258/10/9/2, ff. 13, 19-v, 28-v.

Restoration and after

Northcote’s fondness for the old House of Lords was the main clue in this Parliament that his allegiances could be transferred quickly. After the Parliament was dissolved, and during the ferment caused by the rising of Sir George Boothe* in the summer of 1659, he was regarded by the royalists abroad as a likely agent for the king’s party in the south west, because of his closeness to his cousin, Sir Hugh Pollarde.111CCSP iv. 236, 276. On 13 January 1660, he signed the address from the Devon gentry to Speaker Lenthall of the revived Rump Parliament, calling for the Members secluded in 1648 to be re-admitted.112Som. RO, DD Baker/9/3/3. By February, he was clearly working in the king’s interest, and on the 7th, the Rump ordered his arrest, along with Sir Coplestone Bampfylde* and Sir William Courtenay, as ringleaders in disturbances at Exeter. He was arrested by Unton Croke II*, and brought to London.113CJ vii. 836a; CCSP iv. 551; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 366. Given the political tide towards admission of the secluded Members, his period in detention was probably bound to be brief. The order for Northcote’s release came on 21 February, and on the 27th he was in the House, to be named appropriately to a committee to enumerate political prisoners and those under sequestration.114CJ vii. 847b, 854a. On the 29th he was named to three committees, dealing with the confession of faith, loans from the City and the militia there.115CJ vii. 855b, 856a. His last committee in this Parliament came on 3 March, on the deanery of Christ Church, Oxford. The Parliament dissolved itself on 16 March.116CJ vii. 860b.

Northcote was well regarded by the king, probably largely for his conduct in 1659-60, and had the projected order of the royal oak reached fruition, he would have been included, his estate estimated to be worth £1,500.117Devon and Cornw. N and Q, xviii. 316. He was a very active member in the Convention of 1660, being named to 67 committees. He was a client of George Monck*, 1st duke of Albemarle, from whom he borrowed money.118PROB11/352/435. The loquacity which had marked his style in both the Long Parliament and the 1659 Parliament did not desert him, and some 46 speeches of his are recorded. Religion became a significant interest of his during this Parliament, probably as the first signs of the Anglican reaction began to appear: during the 1640s and 50s it had not figured particularly noticeably among his parliamentary interests. He spoke strongly against deans and chapters; his aversion to popery chimes with the fears he harboured about the Irish rebellion back in 1641. Revenue and supply for the army are two subjects which had absorbed Northcote’s energies in 1659 and now again in the Convention. Northcote failed to find a place in the Cavalier Parliament until 1667, and by the 1670s he had become a supporter of the court and a client of John Granville, 1st earl of Bath.119HP Commons, 1660-90. He drew up his will on 19 July 1675, leaving cash bequests of over £5,000. His insistence on a ‘not pompous or costly’ funeral and his wish for his youngest son that God would ‘turn his heart from doting on the vanities of this wicked age’ reveal that his puritan piety was undimmed.120PROB11/352/435. He died on 24 June 1676, and was buried at Newton St Cyres. A descendant sat for Exeter from 1735 to 1743.